The Education Gadfly Weekly

This dense yet eminently Tweetable report offers factoid after factoid to describe the state of child welfare in America—and, by default, the challenges facing education reformers and others. The compendium pulls from twenty-plus federal sources and highlights seven categories of child welfare, including education; health; economic circumstance; and family, social, and physical environments. In 2012, for example, 64 percent of children ages zero to seventeen lived with both parents. (Just 4 percent lived solely with their fathers—the same proportion as lived with no parents at all.) Two percent of eighth graders—and 9 percent of twelfth graders—reported smoking a cigarette daily. And 8 percent of youth from sixteen to nineteen are neither enrolled in school nor working. While the report is a belt-notch above 200 pages, the education section is digestible—if not groundbreaking: The authors report that reading to young children positively affects school success (happily, 83 percent of those ages three through five who weren’t yet enrolled in preschool were read to in the home at least three times per week). Hispanics continue to make strong gains in reading and math. But NAEP reading scores in general have improved little—save at the eighth-grade level. While not new, these are still notable findings—and a great reminder not just of the work ahead on the education-reform front but also the context in which those efforts occur.

SOURCE: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2013 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 2013).

Tanned and refreshed, Mike’s back in the saddle, this time joined by Fordham media relations and outreach manager Michelle Gininger to talk Common Core tests, Wisconsin’s Act 10, and school accountability in the Sunshine State. Amber digs into the statistics on child well-being.

Amber's Research Minute

America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2013, Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 2013).

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

Despite the tireless marriage-wrecking efforts of Common Core opponents and their acolytes and funders, few states that initially pledged their troth to these rigorous new standards for English and math are in divorce mode. What’s far more fluid, unpredictable, and—frankly—worrying are the two elements of standards-based reform that make a vastly greater difference in the real world than standards themselves: implementation and assessment.

Don’t get me wrong. Standards are important, because they set forth the desired outcomes of schooling and it’s obviously better to aim for clear, ambitious, and academically worthy goals than at targets that are vague, banal, easy, or trendy. Standards are also supposed to provide the framework that shapes and organizes the rest of the education enterprise: curricula, teacher preparation, promotion and graduation expectations, testing and accountability, and just about everything else. (Kindergarten standards, for example, should affect what happens in preschool just as twelfth-grade standards should synch with what gets taught to college freshmen.)

But standards are not self-actualizing. Indeed, they can be purely symbolic, even illusory. Unless thoroughly implemented and properly assessed, they have scant traction in schools, classrooms, and the lives—and futures—of students.

California is the woeful poster child here, as I was reminded the other day (in connection not with the Common Core but with science). For years, it’s had terrific standards in the core subjects, but it’s also had pathetic achievement on external measures such as NAEP. That’s mainly because—in my interpretation, anyway—the Golden State never really put those solid standards into operation in its schools, nor did it make them part of a full-on accountability system for schools, kids, or educators.

Much the same tale can be told of Indiana. Meanwhile, however, Massachusetts and Florida treated their fine standards—in Florida’s case, one might better say “improving” standards—as the girders on which they constructed coherent and comprehensive implementation-assessment-accountability systems. And they have the results to prove it.

For the Common Core standards really to take root and blossom, every state that claims to follow them faces a mammoth implementation challenge. Yes, it will cost some money (though that can be mitigated via astute use of technology), but the harder challenge is the extent to which new standards disrupt long-established practices throughout the system and demand that millions of people do things differently than they’re accustomed to. (At the classroom level, these are called “instructional shifts.”)

As dogged implementation watchers (and Common Core hopefuls), we at Fordham have been impressed by some of what we’ve seen, discouraged by others, and impatient with many more. (“When will they get serious?”) As expected, everyone asserts that their curricula, textbooks, and in-service programs are now “aligned” with the Common Core, but who knows whether that’s really true? The country doesn’t yet have mechanisms for determining which are and which aren’t, although evaluation criteria are beginning to emerge, as are whistleblowers. (See, for example, Mark Bauerlein’s pointed critique of some high school curriculum guides in New York City.)

The assessment folks have perhaps the tallest mountains to climb. It’s a truism that what gets tested is what gets taught—but truisms get that label because they’re true. If the assessments that states use in connection with the Common Core don’t match the standards’ ambitious learning expectations, then few young people will end up learning what they will need (in these two subjects) to be truly college and career ready.

Let’s not kid ourselves about how challenging that really is. Keep in mind how few test-takers are currently deemed “college ready” on multiple gauges, from the testimony of professors (and employers) to the annual reports by ACT and other groups. Even more persuasive, check out the thickening body of evidence that NAEP’s “proficient” level—long derided by critics as too tough and typically attained by just one-quarter to one-third of U.S. high school seniors—really does correlate with academic preparedness for college-level work in math and English.

The Common Core–assessment mountains have multiple peaks. Here are the steepest:

• Substantive alignment: Does the content of the assessments—the skills and knowledge that they actually probe—faithfully represent what’s in the standards themselves?
• Cognitive alignment: The Common Core expects students to think, analyze, and engage in intellectual tasks that have long been AWOL from many U.S. classrooms. These tasks are hard to assess and don’t particularly lend themselves to multiple-choice questions. (Examples: “Analyzing risk in situations such as extreme sports, pandemics, and terrorism.” “Support claim(s) with clear reasons and relevant evidence, using credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text.” “Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., the Gettysburg Address, King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), including how they address related themes and concepts.”) Test items that accurately appraise such learning are complex, time consuming, hard to score, and—therefore—costly. Test makers can’t just recycle their old item banks.
• Rigor: It’s not enough to include a topic or task on the test. The evaluation of student responses must also be based on scoring criteria or rubrics that look for what is actually expected and for bona fide proficiency in relation thereto.
• Cut scores: How does one judge pupils’ overall performance in relation to “how good is good enough” for, say, promotion from third to fourth grade or high school graduation, bearing in mind the intellectual hurdles of “career and college readiness” and the political hurdle of excessive failure rates, especially during the transition to new standards and higher expectations? (Not to mention the challenge of getting states to agree with each other on those cut scores.)
• Adaptability: For assessments to work well for students across the learning spectrum, they must contain scads of items of varying difficulty. But for that to occur, the tests must “adapt” to individual pupils’ approximate levels of performance, not require every kid to answer every question. This generally necessitates computer-based assessments, yet not all schools have the hardware or bandwidth.
• Resolving test schizophrenia: Many people look to assessments as “summative” instruments that determine after the fact whether students in a given grade or school have learned what they should. Of far greater value to educators, however, are “formative” assessments that provide feedback on which skills, concepts, and key knowledge bits have or haven’t yet been acquired by which kids, so that something can be done about it while there’s time. Few tests do both things well, but the new assessment systems emerging to accompany the Common Core are tasked with accomplishing precisely this.
• Affordability: State testing budgets are lean, probably too lean, and the fastest way to talk officials out of high-quality Common Core assessments is to declare them unaffordable.

Getting all of this right is proving hugely difficult for the twin consortia (PARCC, Smarter Balanced) now developing Common Core assessment systems from scratch—but at least they appear fully committed. More worrying are longtime test vendors, not just commercial firms like Pearson and McGraw-Hill but also veteran nonprofits like ACT, Measured Progress, and the Northwest Evaluation Association. Some seem ready to slap a new cover on their old tests and declare them “aligned” with the Common Core, and some of their salesmen are whispering into the ears of state superintendents, promising assessments that aren’t just aligned but also cheap, speedy, and convenient—even ready next spring. But how can all of that be true? (See above.) How many state officials are test-savvy enough to evaluate such claims? And how many may quietly be heading to a back-door exit from the real challenges of the Common Core, settling for assessments that won’t ever prod the education system itself to raise its sights or teachers to make the demanding pedagogical changes that are needed if their pupils are truly to be prepared for college and career?

In the middle of 2013, we’d be wiser to focus on these challenges than to keep fussing over the standards themselves. And—let’s face it—states that aren’t prepared to scale such mountains might be better off not pretending that they’ve embraced the Common Core.

This piece was updated on July 18, 2013, for the Eduation Gadfly Weekly.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has been called a lot of things over the past two years; many of these epithets are unprintable in this family-friendly publication. But according to a new Fordham report, he deserves one more: public-education hero.

That’s because his Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill of 2011—better known as Act 10, the endlessly contentious measure that shrank (to wages only) the scope of collective bargaining for Badger State teachers—defused the fiscal time bomb that otherwise would have blown up Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS).

Pre-Act 10, MPS was drowning in the rising waters of its retirement obligations (both pensions and retiree health benefits) to current and former teachers. In 2011, it spent $1,860 per pupil for this purpose, more than a tenth of the district’s budget. But the waters were slated to get far deeper.

According to a new technical study by economist Robert M. Costrell and education-finance expert Larry Maloney, MPS was on track to spend as much as $3,512 per pupil by 2020 on retiree health benefits and pension costs, money that would inevitably impact classrooms and students in unfortunate ways. Put differently, without Act 10, retirement obligations would have doubled from 11.5 percent of total MPS expenditures to 23.5 percent (!) by 2020.

MPS would have faced such agonizing choices as whether to fire a quarter of its teachers or negotiate a 25 percent reduction in their pay. Class sizes would inevitably have grown. Fresh, eager young teachers would inevitably not have been hired.

Thankfully, such a fate has been averted, at least for a while. Act 10 authorized MPS to modify its retiree health program, and the district has availed itself of that opportunity. In November 2011, the Milwaukee Board of School Directors approved a series of important changes, including reduction of the retiree health subsidy (and other measures), that will reduce current expenditures and slow future growth. Instead of rising from $831 per pupil in 2011 to $2,135 by 2020 (an increase of $1,304 per pupil), our report projects a more modest rise of $248 per pupil to $1,079.

Act 10 helped on the pension front, too. The law actually required employees to pay their share into the state retirement plan. (Previously, the teacher union had successfully bargained to have MPS pick up both the employee and employer contributions to the pension plan—meaning current teachers were paying nothing into their own retirement fund.) What’s more, by taking retirement benefits off the bargaining table, MPS could freeze its separate teacher-pension plan (a supplement to the statewide program). As a result, MPS pension costs are now projected to drop $184 per pupil by 2020.

None of this is apt to win votes for Governor Walker, as fixing the unfunded liabilities of public-sector pension and health-care benefit plans is wonky, complicated, and seems faintly harsh. Few teachers will thank Governor Walker for being able to remain in their jobs. But they and the citizens of Wisconsin should do so. So should the parents of children whose teachers won’t be fired.

Will other states follow suit? Or will they and their school systems end up in the financial ruin that Walker forestalled?

StudentsFirst has made a thoughtful contribution to the burgeoning literature on school governance with its new policy brief Change the Leadership, Change the Rules: Improving Schools and Districts through Mayoral and State Governance. In it, the group argues that school boards have been largely ineffective in urban areas and examines two main alternatives: mayoral control and state control—the latter preferably via the “recovery district” model. It’s a short and snappy synopsis.

The Brookings Institute’s Hamilton Project has produced another worthy read: Thirteen Economic Facts about Social Mobility and the Role of Education is organized around three theses: inequality is on the rise against a backdrop of low social mobility; the U.S. is experiencing a growing divide in educational investments and outcomes based on family income; and education and smart interventions can help—such as those outlined in Caroline Hoxby’s Expanding College Opportunities project and Ben Castleman’s Summer Melt study. While the facts themselves are not new, the report offers an accessible and logical assemblage. Dig in!

On Monday, Michigan governor Rick Snyder chose finance expert Jack Martin to succeed Roy Roberts as emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools (DPS). Martin enters the ring with four decades of private- and public-sector experience under his belt, including stints as CFO of the U.S. Department of Education and emergency manager of Highland Park Schools (another troubled school district in the Detroit metro area). What’s more, he is himself a DPS graduate. Martin is surely well credentialed and the local papers are hopeful—but the Motor City has a way “handling” that sort of optimism, and quickly.

Back in the 1970s, a set of thirteen-year-old students participated in a study in which they took both the SAT and the Differential Aptitude Test, which measures spatial-reasoning skills. In a study released Monday, researchers tracked the professional progress of 563 students who had scored in the top 0.5 percent of the SAT thirty years ago (when they were thirteen-year-olds) and had also taken the Differential Aptitude Test, which measures spatial-reasoning skills—nicknamed the “orphan ability” for its tendency to go undetected. Although those who scored high on SATs did tend to be high achievers later in life (measured in terms of scholarly papers published and patents held), sky-high scores on the spatial-reasoning test were even more predictive of success, especially in STEM fields. According to the New York Times, “Earlier studies have shown that students with high spatial aptitude are not only overrepresented in [STEM] fields, but may receive little guidance in high school and underachieve as a result.”

A report from Human Rights Watch argues that students with disabilities in China are consistently barred from regular schools unless they can “prove” that they will be able to adapt to the schools’ physical and learning environment—and that they receive few or no accommodations. As a result, 28 percent of these kids are not enrolled in school at all, and many of those who do attend school are are “blocked from mainstream institutions or taught by untrained teachers.” True enough, U.S. special ed needs a makeover—but China needs to start from square one.

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.

This dense yet eminently Tweetable report offers factoid after factoid to describe the state of child welfare in America—and, by default, the challenges facing education reformers and others. The compendium pulls from twenty-plus federal sources and highlights seven categories of child welfare, including education; health; economic circumstance; and family, social, and physical environments. In 2012, for example, 64 percent of children ages zero to seventeen lived with both parents. (Just 4 percent lived solely with their fathers—the same proportion as lived with no parents at all.) Two percent of eighth graders—and 9 percent of twelfth graders—reported smoking a cigarette daily. And 8 percent of youth from sixteen to nineteen are neither enrolled in school nor working. While the report is a belt-notch above 200 pages, the education section is digestible—if not groundbreaking: The authors report that reading to young children positively affects school success (happily, 83 percent of those ages three through five who weren’t yet enrolled in preschool were read to in the home at least three times per week). Hispanics continue to make strong gains in reading and math. But NAEP reading scores in general have improved little—save at the eighth-grade level. While not new, these are still notable findings—and a great reminder not just of the work ahead on the education-reform front but also the context in which those efforts occur.

SOURCE: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2013 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 2013).